A couple of days ago I got the below email about the next UKOUG Database Server SIG being full. That’s great to see! A full user group meeting. If I still wanted to attend, I could be added to the waiting list:

It made me smile as, guess what, I was already due to be there. I was the last speaker on the agenda! It was going to be awkward if I failed to get from the waiting list to an actual place at the event, it could be a very quiet session…

As I said, it made me smile – I’m not having a go at the UKOUG over this. Because, as I’m sure many of you are aware due to the day job, removing people from a mailing list who are no longer going to be interested is not always easy (I know, it should be easy, but it just seems not to be). Anyone registered for an event should be on an exclude list for the event. But only for that event. And for that to occur you have to make sure that all speakers and committee are registered (as committee and speakers can be very poor at actually registering!).

Sales and promotion communications are one thing and, let’s face it, in the scheme of things damned unimportant – except to the company doing the sales. If you sell clothes and you mess up on your communications to me, I’ll have a poorer opinion of your company and I don’t mind having that poor opinion. I won’t buy your clothes, no skin off my nose. As a recent example on a personal level, my mother was having a new door and window fitted. She was contacted by a company that replaced a couple of her windows the year before and as the service was fine then and she knew she had to have the door replaced, she said yes. But then she got called by them again a month later asking if she wanted any more windows or doors – “But I just ordered from you, have you lost the order?”. They apologised and said it would not happen again. But it did, a couple of times – including the day before the new door was to be fitted, whilst she was waiting for a call about the exact time for the work the next day. A lesson in How to Confuse A Little Old Lady. The end result is, she won’t use that company again. Especially as the new door seems to have a fault they won’t come and fix. Maybe the inability to take a current client off the pester-list should have warned us off them.

But there are other communications where the need to take care of the exclusions or keep the lists timely are far, far more important. People get really upset if the hospital sends a reminder for a checkup to their father – who died last month, in that hospital. In that situation people are so sensitive that they can’t just accept it as an administrative cock-up. It is now seen as an affront to their dead relative’s memory and a sign the hospital do not care.

An even worse situation than the above is if the hospital wrongly records you as dead. It happens and it happens “quite often” as it is very hard to keep individual, accurate records on people who keep going and changing names, addresses and have the same name and date of birth as other people. I know this as I once had to write the software to do all the test cancellations and notifications required internally in a hospital that occur when someone dies. And I also had to write the software to undo all of that when someone realised the wrong person had been recorded as dead. {The functions were initially called “kill patient” and “resurrect patient” – They got renamed pretty damned quick when people outside the medical staff saw them. Medics have a dark sense of humour that most other people don’t!}. It happens and when you see how many people in a large hospital system have very similar details, you can appreciate why. I bet that right not, somewhere in the UK, is a hospital with two people of the same name & date of birth as inpatients and at least one has a chance of not surviving the experience.

As for sets of duplicate records as no one realised Sarah Twoddypottle is the same person as Sarah Poddytwoddle who came into A&E 4 years ago and neither knew their NHS number… 20 years ago I could have done a PhD on the topic of duplicate patient records, the situation was so bad – and not at all helped by people wanting “privacy” ie no joining up of national medical records. I digress.

People get similarly upset about money (some more so than medical!) – any attempt to offer someone a loan who is already in debt and won’t be accepted for a loan causes all sorts of anger and annoyance. It’s all seen as personal by the wronged customer when in fact it is just an impersonal business function. No, they don’t care about you Mr Postlethwaite, but they don’t not care about you either. You are just one of a million customers. Level of care for the individual is not part of the equation.

I’ll finish on an interesting one. Companies that offer gambling services have to abide by some strict rules about who they can promote their services to or even allow to use their services. To try and halt the horrendous increase in people gambling away money they don’t have there are strict legal rules about self-exclusion and cooling off periods. If you get into serious debt due to gambling you can state you are an addict and it was partly the fault of the company you gambled with. So they must not encourage you any more. At least not for 6 months. {NB I am not a lawyer, I may have the exact details wrong, but the gist is right}. After the time period they are allowed to advertise to the person again as it would be wrong and immoral (???) to exclude them forever. Besides, they are a good source of revenue…

It’s important to get your communications correct, timely and exclusion-aware. And just consider in what situations people might be especially sensitive to what they see as an impersonal system not caring about them or their nearest and dearest. Most people find it hard to accept that such mistakes are not personal, even when they are blatantly impersonal.

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Ahhh…oh yes… The reason I no longer buy Persil… Because they kept sending me mailshots about how to ‘entertain my children’ for the summer holidays…..for those of you know Martin in person, you know that you would not want him to procreate. I complained in person to them , explaining how it was a) presumptuous and b) could be distressing… To no avail… So now I WILL NEVER BUY PERSIL.